A History of Britain, Volume 3 (24 page)

On an unseasonably warm spring morning, Monday, 10 April, the Chartist crowds gathered at their four London rallying points. The atmosphere was festive, rather than threatening. The Bloomsbury crowd (who picked up the enormous bales of paper) were beribboned and rosetted in green, red and white; the Bethnal Green marchers in pink and white; and the East Enders carried white flags. The spectators who looked at the marchers, and at the carts and cabs bearing Chartist slogans – ‘Live and Let Live’; ‘Liberty is Worth Living and Dying For’ – and who saw a boatload of military pensioners, shipped in from Woolwich, join the parade over the bridges, seemed quiet or gently encouraging. This was despite the authorities’ advance demonology that bloodthirsty British Jacobins were out on the streets.

Taking no chances, Lord John Russell’s government certainly prepared as if they were expecting not just a rebellion, but an enemy invasion. With governments tumbling like skittles the previous month, there was a serious scare that French, Italian and German republicans, sworn to revolutionary internationalism, would take advantage of London’s crowds to spread their subversive creed. Riding the panic, a Removal of Aliens Act was hastily sent through parliament, requiring foreigners to register with the authorities and alerting patriots to those with suspiciously insurrectionary facial hair.

And if there were a ghost of a chance that danger was approaching across the Channel, who better to repel it than the Duke of Wellington? With his Hyde Park mansion, Apsley House, boarded up, the white-haired old warrior, still quite trim if a little creaky at the joints, assumed command of his last army – now to be mobilized against the British working class, who were rumoured to have five cannon of their own! Some 85,000
men
were sworn in as special constables to supplement the 4000 Peelers of Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police and 8000 regular troops. Government offices were barricaded with crate-loads of official papers and copies of
Hansard
. Guns and cannon were posted at critical sites: the Bank of England and the Tower of London. The Stock Exchange volunteered some 300 of its own employees as ‘specials’ to defend the bastion of capitalism. Defensive stations, complete with light artillery, were set up on the Mall to prevent access to Buckingham Palace. (The royal family had in any case, on the advice of the government, taken themselves off to the Isle of Wight to avoid anything disagreeable.) Orders went out to allow controlled access over the bridges to Kennington – but, if necessary, to bar the route back.

One ex-radical, John Cam Hobhouse, then an anxious government minister working at the India Office in the ghostly centre of the capital, mostly deserted except for green-ribboned demonstrators, was worried about being separated from his family at such a critical moment. The front door of his London house had been ‘chalked’ by the Chartists, identifying him as a declared Enemy of the People. ‘I sat down to office business not expecting, but thinking it by no means improbable, that I should hear discharges of musketry or cannon from the other side of the river. Indeed the slamming of doors made me start twice.’

He need not have been quite so anxious. Given this overwhelming display of force, O’Connor had the same decision to make that faced all the leaders of European marches and demonstrations in the springtime of 1848: whether to force the issue by attacking the soldiers head-on and hoping for defections, or to opt for a tactical stand-off or even retreat. And here, perhaps as he knew, the geography of rebellion was not on the Chartists’ side. In Paris, Berlin, Budapest, Prague and Vienna the foot soldiers of liberty were local artisans and workers who barricaded themselves in their quarters, hoisted the flags of revolution and defied government troops to come and get them. They could legitimately appear to be defending hearth and home. But Londoners
en masse
were not so unified in hatred of the government, still less of their rose-queen. It was the rank-and-file Chartists from the provinces, some with Irish, Scottish or Welsh leaders, who had been cast as the occupying army. Besides, O’Connor looked at the logistical odds should he choose to force a bloody confrontation and realized that his Chartists could never win. At Kennington, speaking through repeaters standing on platforms dispersed through the huge crowd, surrounded by his Irish praetorian guard gathered beneath a huge green flag decorated with the harp, O’Connor announced that his orders were not to provoke any kind of incident with the soldiers and
police,
however greatly the demonstrators were goaded. A pretext for slaughter was just what the authorities wanted. The trouble was that he himself, and certainly Harney, had raised the stakes very high. Some of the banners hanging from the petition wagon had rashly proclaimed that there would be ‘No Surrender’ or ‘No Way Back’. Predictably, then, some of the younger men were not in the mood to hear the voice of the turtle dove. There were shouts and scuffles. On Blackfriars Bridge on the way back, faced with a solid wall of truncheon-wielding police, there was heaving and stone-throwing, charges and counter-charges. Arrests were made, and then the prisoners were rescued by the crowds. Heads bled along with disappointed hearts.

But O’Connor really had no choice. The bloody days of June in Paris, when the provisional government of the Second French Republic turned its guns on the workers’ barricades, would show just how resolute the ‘forces of order’ could be when faced with ongoing popular strikes and insurrection. What good would a similarly futile and tragic scenario have done the cause of popular democracy in Britain? A glance at the photograph of the meeting at Kennington speaks volumes about the Chartist tradition handed down from the 17th and 18th centuries: it shows a disciplined, Sunday-best dressed ‘respectable’ protest by workers always anxious to give the lie to their demonization as a drunken, semi-criminal rabble.

After the immediate threat was over, not everyone was cackling with glee at the fake names said to have padded the numbers on the petition – all those ‘Mr Punches’ and ‘Queen Victorias’. Those
canards
– faithfully repeated in the textbooks I grew up with, which treated a 19th-century revolution in Britain as though it were a biological impossibility – formed part of the self-congratulatory mythology of the governing class. At the time, opinion was often much more sober and uncertain. The
London Illustrated News
– certainly happy that ‘the mountain has laboured: the mouse has been born’ – still admonished those who had belittled the petition in parliament, or greeted it ‘amidst great laughter’, stating that it ill became those who derived ‘their only real power from the people’ to ridicule a document which, if ‘a hundredth or even a five hundredth part of the signatures are bona fide … it is a petition which the Legislature of England ought to receive with seriousness’.

The jitteriness with which he had handled 10 April spelled, indisputably, the end of Feargus O’Connor as a credible political leader of a mass movement. But it was certainly not the end of Chartism as a militant working-class crusade. Some of its stalwarts became early trade union leaders; others, like the fictional, traumatized John Barton, turned to desperate
acts
of terrorism. Just three months after Kennington, all the sniggering went suddenly silent when 50,000 demonstrators showed up at the newly built Trafalgar Square. On Whit Monday, at Bonners’ Fields, London, another huge crowd appeared carrying tricolour republican flags and calling for ‘More Pigs, Less Parsons’ and ‘England Free or a Desert’ before colliding with a solid wall of police. Fitful rebellion still rumbled on in Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire. The ‘Wat Tyler of Bradford’, Isaac Jefferson, organized more skirmishes, went on the run, was arrested (although his wrists were too big to be handcuffed), was sprung from captivity and managed to keep thousands of soldiers busy before the town finally calmed down at the end of the year.

If democratic agitation was not going to put bread on the table, perhaps quieter, less confrontational means might do better. A single cottage at Great Dodford in Worcestershire is all that survives of one of those peaceful schemes of working-class self-improvement, the Chartist Land Company. The company had been established by O’Connor in 1845 in fulfilment of a dream inherited from the 17th-century communes and more recently from Irish reformers. Its aim was to take back to the rural world from which they or their forebears had come those workers – often handloom weavers or stocking frame knitters made redundant by the new power machinery – who had been stranded in the slums of industrial Britain. (The vast majority of factory workers were still, in fact, first-generation immigrants from the countryside.) Those able to put down a little money would be given a plot of a few acres on which food could be grown and a few animals kept: this was the resurrection of the strips and back lots they had lost to enclosure and engrossment.

The Land Company was a classically British combination of dreamy utopianism and solid business sense. It tapped into the already active instincts of working men – and especially working women – to save. Enough money was raised to buy property including the land at Great Dodford. Subscribers were sold shares corresponding to their investment, and the first settlers chosen by lottery; then, when lotteries were made illegal, by auction or by the placing of direct deposits.

‘Do or die’ was the motto of the newcomers at Great Dodford, and their work was certainly no picnic. Boulder-strewn land had to be cleared, roads and paths laid out, hedges planted, all with no certain outcome. But some of the settlers did make a go of it. Ann Wood, for example, was an Edinburgh charlady who had had enough Scottish thrift to save £150, a sum impressive enough to give her the pick of the lots at Great Dodford. After settling at number 36, along with her two daughters, Ann did well enough to lead a long life in the village, dying at 86.

The conspicuous presence of women in the Chartist Land Company village may be another indicator that, once the worst of the hard times were over, working families might be prepared to settle for a home rather than a revolution; a world in which the Great Exhibition, rather than Marx’s
Communist Manifesto
(1848), pointed the way to the future. And although it is true that the propertied, political classes, having survived Chartism, would be in no mood to introduce a fuller democracy for another generation, it would be a patronizing mistake to write off the will to build domestic security as some sort of defeatist placebo. Arguably it was precisely the quieter, constructive strategies of the 1850s and early 1860s – cooperatives; friendly societies; peaceful unionism; the profile of a self-improving, responsible, labouring and lodging class – that made it possible for both Tories and Liberals to embrace household male suffrage in the second Reform Act of 1867, without fearing (although some inevitably did) that they were instigating a revolution by the back door.

The family may have been the great mid-Victorian fetish. But the boom economy of the decade and a half between 1848 and the ‘Cotton Famine’ of the mid-1860s did make it possible to stitch back together some of the fabric of domestic life that had been so badly ripped up in the first phase of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. The militants of the ‘hungry forties’ had been, typically, surplus-to-requirement craftsmen and artisans, especially cotton spinners and handloom weavers, who had been put out of work while women and children (the ‘tenters’ of the mills, hired for menial but dangerous work like crawling under moving machinery to clean cotton fluff) formed a disproportionately large part of the factory labour force. Elizabeth Gaskell’s portrait in
Mary Barton
of despondent, demoralized and finally desperate men looking for some way to express their fury was based on a good deal of social truth. In 1851, for instance, 255,000 men and 272,000 women struggled for a living in cotton mills. But the 1850s did, in fact, make good on many of the promises made by the manufacturers and money men of Manchester, Salford, Bradford and Halifax. Rising export-led demand for manufactured cloth generated nearly full employment. The real value of wages rose. Savings were possible. And for the first time men became integrated in large numbers into the manufacturing labour force. Working the new steam-driven mules, they were given, as foremen, the right to hire and organize both men and women (and sometimes children), thus reinstating, in ways incalculably important for the restoration of morale, some of their lost domestic self-respect. Weaving – the last of the textile sectors to become mechanized – now developed its own technology, which
could
be manned by a male, as well as a female, labour force. In some other industries – especially coal mining – it was, on the other hand, the legislated removal of women and children from work in the pit (where sweltering conditions dictated virtual or actual nakedness as well as brutal physical labour) that, although taxing the domestic economy, actually restored to mining community homes a semblance of matriarchal domestic order.

The prosperous years of the mid-century made for a less confrontational labour force. Women powerloom weavers in Lancashire and Clydeside formed their own unions. But they seldom needed to strike. In the 1860s legal trade unions became more like welfare associations and less like training camps for the class war. Union leaders themselves stressed that the strike would be the weapon of last resort. Dealing with a less confrontational labour force in turn allowed employers to rethink their paternalism. Where once, in return for compliance with wage cuts, they had offered what they claimed were benefits, like the provision of food, now they made room for unions, friendly societies and cooperatives to organize, collaboratively, more of their own independent culture. The 1850s were the decade when works brass bands appeared, sometimes with an initial investment by the owner; when annual works outings to the country, the seaside and the Crystal Palace, re-erected at Sydenham, south London, after the Great Exhibition closed, were organized. Of course, many of those occasions were custom-designed to show off the benevolence of the new industrial squirarchy: the summer tea party at the turreted rose-brick, Gothic Revival mansion on the hill where the full complement of servants (many of them from the same families as the factory hands) would be serving cakes and lemonade; the cricket match between owners (the sons just down from one of the ‘new’ public schools, such as Marlborough and Tonbridge) and the ‘men’.